This book is fuelled by a close personal, as well as professional, interest in the dramatic emergence and astonishing tenacity of allergies in the modern world. At the turn of the millennium, an English independent commission on the organization of the school year strongly recommended adopting a sixterm, rather than the traditional three-term,academic year.
Within this framework, the new fifth term, stretching from early April until the end of May, was to be devoted largely to assessing and examining pupils.
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In addition to ‘rationalising the process of assessment’ and making greater space in term six for induction into the following year’s programmes,this innovative educational policy was also intended to ‘create more equitable assessment arrangements for 1.4 million to 1.8 million hay fever sufferers by moving assessment and examinations out of the main pollen season for grass, which is the major cause of hay fever’.
Drawing strength from concurrent attempts to reform curricula and modes of assessment throughout the educational system, the commission believed that the rhythm of school life should be determined, at least in part, by the prevalence of a minor, albeit distressing, allergic disease.
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